PRISON INMATES around the country have called for a series of strikes against forced labor, demanding reforms of parole systems and prison policies, as well as more humane living conditions, a reduced use of solitary confinement, and better health care.

Inmates at up to five Texas prisons pledged to refuse to leave their cells today. The strike’s organizers remain anonymous but have circulated fliers listing a series of grievances and demands, and a letter articulating the reasons for the strike. The Texas strikers’ demands range from the specific, such as a “good-time” credit toward sentence reduction and an end to $100 medical co-pays, to the systemic, namely a drastic downsizing of the state’s incarcerated population.

“Texas’s prisoners are the slaves of today, and that slavery affects our society economically, morally and politically,” reads the five-page letter announcing the strike. “Beginning on April 4, 2016, all inmates around Texas will stop all labor in order to get the attention from politicians and Texas’s community alike.”

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which oversees the state’s prisons, “is aware of the situation and is closely monitoring it,” spokesperson Robert Hurst wrote in a statement to The Intercept. He did not comment on the prisoners’ grievances and demands. Prisoner rights advocates said at least one prison — the French Robertson Unit in Abilene — was placed under lockdown today, but Hurst denied any prisons in Texas were on lockdown because of planned strikes.

Constitutional Servitude

The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution bans “involuntary servitude” in addition to slavery, “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,” thus establishing the legal basis for what is today a $2 billion a year industry, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit research institute.

Most able-bodied prisoners at federal facilities are required to work, and at least 37 states permit contracting prisoners out to private companies, though those contracts account for only a small percentage of prison labor. “Ironically, those are the only prison labor programs where prisoners make more than a few cents an hour,” Judith Greene, a criminal justice policy analyst, told The Intercept.

Instead, a majority of prisoners work for the prisons themselves, making well below the minimum wage in some states, and as little as 17 cents per hour in privately run facilities. In Texas and a few other states, mostly in the South, prisoners are not paid at all, said Erica Gammill, director of the Prison Justice League, an organization that works with inmates in 109 Texas prisons.

In Texas, prisoners have traditionally worked on farms, raising hogs and picking cotton, especially in East Texas, where many prisons occupy former plantations.

“If you’ve ever seen pictures of prisoners in Texas working in the fields, it looks like what it is,” Greene said. “It’s a plantation: The prisoners are all dressed in white, they got their backs bent over whatever crop they’re tending, the guards are on horseback with rifles.” In the facilities Greene visited, prisoners worked all day in the heat only to return to cells with no air conditioning. “The conditions are atrocious, and it’s about time the Texas prison administration had to take note.”

In 1963, in an effort to reduce the cost of running prisons, Texas began employing inmates to manufacture a wide array of products, including mattresses, shoes, soaps, detergents, and textiles, as well as the furniture used in many of the state’s official buildings. Because of labor laws restricting the sale of prisoner-made goods, Greene said, those products are usually sold to state and local government agencies.

Although they comprise nearly half the incarcerated population nationwide — about 870,000 as of 2014 — prison workers are not counted in official labor statistics; they get no disability compensation in case of injury, no social security benefits, and no overtime.

“They keep a high conviction rate at any cost,” reads the letter circulated by prisoners ahead of today’s strike, “all for the well-being of the multimillion-dollar Prison Industrial Complex.”

An Underground Prison Network

The Texas action is not an isolated one. Prisoners in nearby Alabama and Mississippi, and as far away as Oregon, have also been alerted to the Texas strike through an underground network of communication between prisons.

“Over the long term, we’ll probably see more work stoppages,” said Gammill. “In prison, you think it’d be difficult to spread information, but it actually spreads like wildfire.”

On April 1, a group of prisoners from Ohio, Alabama, Virginia, and Mississippi called for a “nationally coordinated prisoner work stoppage against prison slavery” to take place on September 9, the 45th anniversary of the Attica prison riot. “We will not only demand the end to prison slavery, we will end it ourselves by ceasing to be slaves,” that announcement reads. “They cannot run these facilities without us.”

Prison protests and strikes have seen a revival in recent years after a slowdown resulting from the increased use of solitary confinement to isolate politically active inmates. In 2010, thousands of inmates from at least six Georgia prisons, organizing through a network of contraband mobile phones, refused to leave their cells to work, demanding better living conditions and compensation for their labor. That action was followed by prison protests in Illinois, Virginia, North Carolina, and Washington. In 2013, California prisoners coordinated a hunger strike to protest the use of solitary confinement. On the first day of that protest, 30,000 prisoners across the state refused their meals.

In March, protests erupted at Holman Correctional Facility, a maximum security state prison in Alabama, where two riots broke out over four days. At least 100 prisoners gained control of part of the prison and stabbed a guard and the warden. Those protests were unplanned, but prisoners there had also been organizing coordinated actions that they say will go ahead as planned.

“We have to strain the economics of the criminal justice system, because if we don’t, we can’t force them to downsize,” an activist serving a life sentence at Holman told The Intercept. “Setting fires and stuff like that gets the attention of the media,” he said. “But I want us to organize something that’s not violent. If we refuse to offer free labor, it will force the institution to downsize.”

“Slavery has always been a legal institution,” he added. “And it never ended. It still exists today through the criminal justice system.”

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thank you so much, we as family members need to know what our love ones are enduring during this so call reform stages instead I see these private own industries are getting rich off this as well as using our loves one to make them get richer and abuse them … yes another form of slavery in America

Perhaps now maybe the appropriate time to build a new super max prison and name it “Guatapanamano ” ?

We can then ensure that all of our corrupt leaders, their elite corporate cockroach, tax evaders, war criminals, and war profiteers are given a taste of their own medicine, and kept in a secure place where they can no longer perpetuate their greedy and selfish crimes against humanity.

Anyone up for crowd funding the prison,building and militia for the round up ?

The hidden shame of the prison system really seems to be the issue of healthcare. It’s one thing to impose a period of confinement as punishment for a crime. It’s an entirely different matter to rob those confined of their health.

Come to Australia folks where unemployed people are forced to work a day each week, for no compensation, in order to receive their social security payments. The powers that be explain this gives the unemployed valuable work experience which can be “transferred” to the “paid work environment”. So, as a former government tax adviser with two degrees and over a quarter century of work behind me it was decided I would benefit from sorting out donated clothes in a charity shop, and when I suggested to the supervisor that such work was both a waste of time and beneath me I was considered a fractious upstart with delusions of grandeur and that I should be punished for my arrogance….and they were going to cut my payments for being such a bad boy (I was 49 at the time)…thank goodness I started a doctorate degree the following year and no longer had to jump through the stupid traps and pits set up to ensnare those who have the misfortune of unemployment

First off, no one should be doing anyone’s work for free PERIOD!!! In this day and she we are living in nothing is free. There are many men and women in the prison systems who have nothing and no none to care for them. So if any state or facility benefits from an inmate, then by all means that inmate should be compensated in some way. And to say that these are convicted felons serving their punishment is a load of crap coming from a person who is full of crap. How many innocent people are behind bars for crimes they have never committed. How about all the people who are being released due to DNA evidence? Don’t just speak on something you truly know nothing about. Art the end of the day we ate all human and should be treated just. Because a person is incarcerated, we no longer feel that they are relevant? How sad we are as a people and a nation to not care for the ones who can do minimum for themselves due to their situations. Before we judge, put yourself in ones shoes and see how well you do walking in them!!!!!

gee. Looks like Uncle Lucifer and his “christian followers” have lent their “talents” to wallstreet – we all know wallstreet needs really talented people – who can steal from the public without going to prison.

But given the u.s. position in being globally competitive, maybe it’s just that good ol’ patriotic pashion looking to one-up china!

The commenter seems to not be aware that African Americans make up 59% of those in state prison for drug offenses even though 5 times as many Whites are using drugs as African Americans (about 14 million Whites and 2.6 million African Americans report using an illicit drug), so, yes, it is modern day slavery.

When we start seeing elite white cokeheads and Limbaugh-esque pill poppers locked up indefinitely for drug offenses (which, for obvious reasons will never happen) then you can pretend this is a law and order issue.

hm. Why go thru all the trouble of putting people in prison if it is slave labor we need? Let’s scrap min wage and enslave people so we can get some serious profits. But if it bothers you to simply enslave people, then it is perhaps lucky for some businesses needing slave labor that it is so easy to fill the prisons to feel so much better about slavery.

Oh no, this is much more exploitive. At least slaves were never expected to pay court fees, boarding fees, medical co-pays, inflated commissary prices for basic toiletries, public defender fees, parole fees. A reprehensible as slavery was, at least it never sent you a bill for the all trouble it cost slave owners to exploit your labor.

They may well be convicted felons, but many corporate and bankster criminals repeatedly commit larger crime but never do any time.

You may also want to take into consideration that many of the “convicted felons”have had to plead guilty through the plea bargaining system, when they were innocent, due to financial hardship, and through not being able to afford proper legal representation.

It is obvious that the US prison system exploits and allows prison profiteers to make huge sums of money out of the hard labour of prisoners, and that forcing prisoners to work for slave level wages is slavery. It should also be obvious to anyone with a grain of intelligence that the writer, Alice Speri is aware that she is writing about prisoners.

So why don’t you read some of the books which I listed earlier, as this may help you to understand how unjust the US mass incarceration system is and how describing it as modern slavery is a fair and appropriate description. It is a corrupt system of prison profiteering out of modern slavery.

Don’t worry the number of people being incarcerated will fall dramatically soon, because the corporate slave masters will not need a large prison based slave labour workforce to manufacture their goods cheaply. They will soon benefit from deploying robots and artificial intelligence software bots, and they won’t have to pay robots anything. It won’t just be prison slave labour that becomes obsolete though – I in the machine age the rise of the robots will cause much more widespread technological unemployment.

Texas pays its inmates ZERO wages, yet charges them for (sub-par) medical care, and does not give them any credit for work time or good time. The specialized Braille program staffed by inmates in one of the women’s units in TX brings in over $600,000 annually – yet the workers receive nothing.

For those who believe that inmates are provided with all of their needs, not exactly. They do get (meager, disgusting) meals (only twice a day on the weekends), literal slivers of soap (made by inmates), a golf pencil, a few stamps (5 per month), a tiny tube of toothpaste, and a comb. If they need other hygiene items (shampoo, deodorant, shower shoes), they can only get those by purchasing them through commissary. If they don’t have someone on the outside putting money on their books, they do without. Even though they work – some in the fields, some making those shower shoes, some in the kitchen, some in the braille program, etc., they have no way to pay for medical, or coffee, or deodorant, an eraser, or a pad of paper to write to their loved ones. Many inmates in Texas do not get medical care at all because they can’t afford it.

That’s not a “slave.” That’s a slave.

The punishment is being separated from their loved ones and society (which is a very ineffective way to change behavior). They’re sentenced to prison time, not to slavery.

The USA has about 3% of the world’s population, but has close to 25% of the world’s prison population that being 68 million people equivalent to the entire population of France. Additionally this is the nation that brought to the world a Constitution that proclaimed there would be no cruel and unusual punishment, but has become a rape ridden prison for profit abomination.

The concept of trial among your peers is anything but what the USA Judicial system represents, as those that cannot afford an attorney with strong judicial connections are forced to take plea deals or face the judge in a “Your word verses the police scenario that is sure to get you locked up for as long as we want”.

Then when the prisoners get out they will have all kinds of prison for profit bills to pay from their stay related to products and services they were vastly over charged for throughout their incarceration of forced labor. If they want to take advantage of parole they are then often delivered over to privatized post prison for profit services that bleed the paroles for every cent they can squeeze out of them. Plus remember the prison terms they were given were unjustly severe to reward prison for profit campaign contributors for their gifts to politicians to extend prison sentencing, which happen to make the politicians and judges also look tough on crime.

If you are a corrupt banker that was part of the 2008 Financial Crisis that ripped off the American people of trillions of dollars, which was undoubtedly the greatest financial crime in the history of mankind with all the suffering that came with it, nothing happens to you, other than your company has to pay a tax deductible fine out of the profits they made from the theft.

If this seems amoral there is more to come. The psychopaths that are destroying the environment and have hidden their knowledge of what they knew they were doing, while conspiring to keep doing it for the satisfaction of their greed, are going to use the dire prison for profit situation in order to set up a compromise. They are trying currently to work out relief for the hapless USA prison population by making it so the real corporate criminals are let off the hook once again. Keep an eye out for the legislation they are trying to push through. Then they can get away with charging big bucks for geoengineering that they are already doing, but cannot admit to until they are free to admit they have destroyed the environment, once they know they won’t have to go to prison for doing it.

Note correction: the 68 million people equivalent to the entire population of France mentioned above are Americans with criminal backgrounds not all were in prison at one time and some could have had other non prison penalties.

The fact that the USA has about 3% of the world’s population, but has close to 25% of the world’s prison population is correct.

Sorry it is getting late….I’m tired, but not as tired as the 68 million Americans trying to find a job with a criminal background.

The SIN of the u.s. system of criminalizing people for profit is intentional and the proof is in the equation you iterated..

Then when the prisoners get out they will have all kinds of prison for profit bills to pay from their stay related to products and services they were vastly over charged for throughout their incarceration of forced labor.
+++
68 million Americans trying to find a job with a criminal background.
===
MORE CRIME.

This co-ercion is the same pattern as the trap that wallstreet criminals used to perpetrate false home values to then bundle and sell for profits then upon the collapse to then steal the homes of Americans.

In short, the u.s. economy is run by organized criminals who now own the pos elected persons.

Failing proper action by the elected persons in 2016 to remedy this situation, our candidate will begin in 2018 on a platform to rebuild the economic system and those who oppose (not protest) will end up in prison. The new economy will be a genuine Christian economy prescribed by Jesus himself. It’s design is about complete. Wealth in the face of poverty will not be tolerated.

You made the point; “then upon the collapse to then steal the homes of Americans.”

Now they are using the homes they have stolen to build a new rent derivative bubble and all this comes out of what the right holds in such esteem in that our Republic was founded on Judeo-Cristian values. Moses is more than likely asking Christ do you really think this free will thing is working out.